Synopsis

Panic in Level 4 is a grand tour through the eerie and unforgettable universe of Richard Preston, filled with incredible characters and mysteries that refuse to leave one’s mind. Here are dramatic true stories from this acclaimed and award-winning author, including

• the phenomenon of “self-cannibals,” who suffer from a rare genetic condition caused by one wrong letter in their DNA that forces them to compulsively chew their own flesh–and why everyone may have a touch of this disease• the search for the unknown host of Ebola virus, an organism hidden somewhere in African rain forests, where the disease finds its way into the human species, causing outbreaks of unparalleled horror• the brilliant Russian brothers–“one mathematician divided between two bodies”–who built a supercomputer in their apartment from mail-order parts in an attempt to find hidden order in the number pi (π)

In exhilarating detail, Preston portrays the frightening forces and constructive discoveries that are currently roiling and reordering our world, once again proving himself a master of the nonfiction narrative.

Excerpt

PANIC IN LEVEL 4 by Richard Preston

INTRODUCTION- Adventures in Nonfiction Writing

Oliver Heaviside, the English mathematician and physicist, oncesaid, “In order to know soup, it is not necessary to climb into a pot andbe boiled.” Unfortunately, this statement is not true for journalists. Asa writer of what’s called “literary nonfiction” or “creative nonfiction”–narrative that is said to read like a novel but is factually verifiable–it has often been my practice to climb into the soup. Gettingboiled with your characters is a good way to get to know them, but ithas occasionally led me into frightening situations.

Some years ago, while I was researching The Hot Zone, a book thatfocuses on the Ebola virus, I may have had a meeting with an unknownstrain of Ebola. (A virus is an exceedingly small life-form, an infectiousparasite that replicates inside living cells, using the cell’s own machineryto make more copies of itself.)

Ebola has now been classified into seven different known types.Though it has been studied for more than thirty years, Ebola is one ofthe least-understood viruses in nature. Scientists have been understandablyreluctant to study Ebola too closely because it has on occasionkilled those who tried to do so. The virus was first was noticed in1976, when it surfaced in Yambuku, Zaire (now the Democratic Republicof Congo), near the Ebola River, where it sacked a Catholicmission hospital, killing most of the medical staff along with a numberof patients and people the patients had came into contact with. Ebolaspreads from one person to the next by direct contact with blood or secretions,including sweat. There is no evidence that it can spreadamong humans through the air, although there is some evidence thatit may spread among monkeys this way. As a parasite, Ebola carries onits life cycle in some unidentified type of animal–Ebola’s naturalhost–that lives in certain unidentified habitats in equatorial Africa.Occasionally Ebola comes into contact with a person, and the virusmakes what is known as a trans-species jump from its host into thehuman species.

When Ebola gets inside a human host, it causes the person’s immunesystem to vanish, and the person dies with hemorrhages comingfrom the body’s orifices. The most lethal strains of Ebola have beenknown to kill up to 95 percent of people who become infected with it.Ebola causes people to vomit masses of black blood with a distinctive“coffee grounds” appearance. Victims can have a bright red nosebleed,or epistaxis; it won’t stop. A spotty, bumpy rash spreads over the body,while small, starlike hemorrhages appear beneath the skin. An Ebolapatient can have blood standing in droplets on the eyelids and runningfrom the tear ducts down the face. Blood can flow from the nose,mouth, vagina, rectum. The testicles can become infected with Ebolaand can swell up or be destroyed. Victims display signs of psychosis.They can develop endless hiccups. Rarely, in particularly severe cases ofEbola, the linings of the intestines and rectum may come off. Thosemembranes may be expelled through the anus in raglike pieces calledcasts, or the intestinal lining can emerge in the form of a sleeve, like asock. When an Ebola patient expels a sleeve, it is known as throwing atubular cast.

Some of the action in The Hot Zone takes place at Fort Detrick, anArmy base in the rolling country along the eastern flank of the AppalachianMountains in Maryland, an hour’s drive northwest of Washington,D.C. The Army’s Level 4 virus laboratories at Fort Detrick areclustered inside a large, nearly windowless building that sits near theeastern perimeter of the base. This building is the headquarters of theUnited States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,or USAMRIID–a facility that Army people often simply refer to as “theInstitute.” While I was visiting USAMRIID, or the Institute, to interviewvarious experts in Ebola, I began asking officials at the base for per-mission to put on a biohazard space suit and enter one of the Army’sBiosafety Level 4 virus laboratories. I wanted to get a firsthand look atresearchers handling Ebola. More than that, I wanted to know what itfeels like to wear a biohazard space suit and be face-to-face with a realLevel 4 virus, so that I could get a sense of my characters’ feelings andexperiences, and could describe them with convincing precision.(Many nonfiction writers refer to their characters as “subjects,” but Iprefer to think of them as dramatis personae in a true story.)

Biosafety Level 4, also called BL-4 or Level 4, is the highest andtightest level of biosecurity in a laboratory. Laboratories rated atBiosafety Level 4 are the repositories of viruses called hot agents–lethal viruses for which there is no vaccine or effective cure. Level 4labs are sealed off from the outside world. People who go inside aLevel 4 lab are required to wear a biohazard space suit, a pressurizedwhole-body suit, like an astronaut’s, made of soft, flexible plastic, typicallyblue. Army researchers sometimes refer to the space suit as a“blue suit” because of its color. A soft, flexible helmet that completelysurrounds the head is joined to the suit, and the helmet has a clear,flexible plastic faceplate in it; the suit also has an independent air supply.The air supply prevents you from breathing the air inside the lab,which could be contaminated with a hot agent. Ebola virus is classifiedas a Level 4 hot agent, one of the most dangerous known, and it hasthe potential to be used as a biological weapon. The scientists atUSAMRIID (it’s pronounced “you-SAM-rid”) conduct research intovaccines and drugs that could be used to protect the population of theUnited States against a terrorist or military attack with a biologicalweapon, including Ebola virus. This is medical research, peaceful in nature.

The Level 4 labs inside the Institute consist of groups of interconnectedrooms. Each group of rooms is known as a hot suite or a hotzone. Each suite is sealed off from the outside world and is accessibleonly through an air lock. The air lock has heavy, stainless steel doors.Inside the air lock there is a chemical decontamination shower, alsoknown as a “decon” shower. The purpose of the decon shower is tosterilize the outer surface of the space suits of researchers who are leavinga hot zone, to prevent a hot agent from getting a ride to the outside world. Chest freezers inside the Army’s hot zones are filled withcollections of microvials (tiny plastic test tubes the size of a pencil stub)that contain frozen or freeze-dried samples of many different strains oflethal viruses.

The freezers are kept at 95 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Theyare said to be hot. They are hot in a biological sense: they containfrozen samples of lethal viruses that are held in suspended animation inthe extreme cold. The virus collections stored in USAMRIID’s hot freezersare said to include strains of Bolivian hemorrhagic fever virus, Guanaritovirus, Junín virus, dengue hemorrhagic fever, Venezuelan equineencephalitis (VEE), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), Hendra virus,Nipah virus, Lassa virus, and the seven known types of Ebola. (Theseviruses’ effects on humans vary. Guanarito, Junín, and Lassa, for example,cause hemorrhaging from the body’s orifices, like Ebola. VEE andJEV infect the brain and spinal cord, causing coma or death. Nipah is abrain virus from Malaysia that can trigger a literal meltdown of thebrain. The brain of a Nipah victim can be semiliquefied as the virus consumesit, and can pour out of the skull during an autopsy.) The hotfreezers also may contain (although the Army doesn’t say much aboutthis) an assortment of Level 4 Unknown viruses, or X viruses. The UnknownX viruses appear to be lethal in humans, but little is knownabout them. They’ve never been fully studied or classified. They may includesomething known as the Linköping Samples, which may or maynot harbor an unidentified type of Ebola. The X viruses are presumedto be potentially lethal, so they are kept in Level 4 for safety.

We know that Ebola virus was one of the more powerfulbioweapons in the arsenal of the old Soviet Union. In the years beforethe Soviet Union broke up, in 1991, bioweaponeers had reportedlybeen experimenting with aerosol Ebola–powdered, weaponizedEbola that could be dispersed through the air, over a city, for example.The Soviet weaponized Ebola was apparently stable enough that itcould drift for distances in the air and still infect people through thelungs when they breathed a few particles of it. This is why the U.S.Army was studying it: the Army researchers were trying to come upwith a vaccine or a drug treatment for Ebola, in case of a terrorist ormilitary attack on the United States with Ebola.

As a natural disease, Ebola virus does not seem to be able to passfrom person to person through the air, though. In each of the naturalEbola outbreaks, the disease seems to burn itself out, and Ebola fadesaway and is lost in the backdrop of nature, until, once again, by chance,it finds its way into a human host.

One day I was interviewing the commander of Fort Detrick. Wewere getting toward the end of the interview, and I decided to ask onelast question. “I’d like to try to convey to readers what it really feels liketo be face-to-face with Ebola virus.” I said. “Could I go into Level 4?”

“That should be no problem,” the commander answeredpromptly. “We’ll get you outfitted in a blue suit,” he said, “and walkyou through Suite AA-4”–one of the Ebola hot zones. “It’s downand cold,” he added.

“What do you mean by ‘down and cold’?” I asked.

He explained that the hot zone had been completely sterilizedwith gas and opened up for routine maintenance. The rooms weren’tdangerous. Anyone could go into the lab without wearing a space suit.The hot freezers, too, had been moved out of the lab. Therefore, thelab was completely cold and safe.

“That’s not really what I had in mind,” I said.

“What did you have in mind?” he asked.

“I would like to experience the real thing, so that I can describe it.I’d like to go into a hot BL-4 lab and see how the scientists work withreal Ebola.”

“That’s not possible,” he answered immediately.

Security at USAMRIID was extremely tight. Even so, it was not astight as it would become. That day in the commander’s office wassome nine years before the anthrax terror attacks of the autumn of2001, shortly after 9/11. The anthrax attacks came to be known as theAmerithrax terror event, after the FBI’s name for the case. Small quantitiesof pure, powdered spores of anthrax–a natural bacterium thathas been developed into a very powerful bioweapon–were placed inenvelopes and mailed to several media organizations and to the officesof two United States senators. Five people died after inhaling thespores, while others became critically ill; some of the survivors havenever fully recovered. For the most part the victims, including African-Americans and recent immigrants to the United States, were low-levelemployees of the post office who were just doing their jobs. No onehas been charged with the Amerithrax crimes. The evidence suggeststhey were done by a serial killer or killers who intended to murder peopleand may have taken pleasure in causing the deaths while escapingpunishment. The case remains open.

Officials at the United States Department of Justice named StevenJay Hatfill, a former researcher at USAMRIID, as a “person of interest” inthe case. Hatfill has never been charged with involvement in thecrimes, though. At the same time, there was speculation in the newsmedia that the exact strain of anthrax used in the attacks might havecome out of an Army lab, even possibly from USAMRIID itself, wheredefensive medical research in anthrax had been going on for years.(The precise results of the FBI’s analysis of the anthrax strain have notbeen disclosed by the government, as of this writing.) USAMRIID scientists,in fact, played a key role in the forensic analysis of the anthrax thatwas collected from the envelopes.

Following the Amerithrax terror event, security at USAMRIID becameastronomically tight. After that, it would have been useless for ajournalist to ask to go into the space-suit labs. Back at the time when Iwas researching The Hot Zone, though, there was a slight amount offlexibility in the policy. On certain occasions, the Army had alloweduntrained or inexperienced visitors to go into hot zones at USAMRIID.Unfortunately, as the commander explained to me, some of these visitshad ended badly. People who were not familiar with space-suit workwith hot agents had a tendency to panic in Level 4, he said.

In one such an incident, a medical doctor–a visitor–who had apparentlynever worn a biohazard space suit attended a human autopsyin a Level 4 morgue at the Institute. This hot morgue is called the Submarine.The Submarine is a sealed hot zone with an autopsy room andan autopsy table. The cadaver was believed to be infected with a Level4 Unknown X virus. During the examination, while the space-suitedautopsy team was removing organs from the cadaver, some members ofthe team noticed that the visiting doctor’s face seemed red. As the teammembers looked at him through his faceplate, they saw that his face wasalso dripping with sweat. Meanwhile, the outer surfaces of his space-suitgloves and sleeves were smeared with blood from the cadaver.

Reportedly, the man began saying, “Get me out!” Suddenly hetore off his helmet and ripped open his space suit, gasping for breath,taking in lungfuls of air from the hot morgue.

The members of the autopsy team took hold of him and hurriedhim to an air lock door leading to the exit. They opened the door,pushed him into the air lock. At least one of the team members accompaniedhim into the air lock. The air lock was closed, and thechemical shower was started.

The way I heard the story, the man stood or sat in the air lockwhile the chemicals ran down inside his opened space suit. The showerstopped automatically after seven minutes. The chemicals had floodedhis suit. Then the team members helped him into the staging area–theso-called Level 3 area–and helped pull him out of his space suit. Bythis time, he was subdued and embarrassed.

At USAMRIID, people who have had a verified exposure to a hotagent are put into a Level 4 quarantine hospital suite called the Slammer.The Slammer is a biocontainment unit where doctors and nurseswearing space suits can treat a patient without being exposed to a virusthe patient may have. The man who had panicked was a possible candidatefor quarantine in the Slammer. Even so, after an immediate reviewof the incident by a safety team, the Army felt that he did notneed to be put in quarantine; there was no evidence that the cadaverhad actually been infected with a virus. And the man never got sick.

I still wanted to go into Level 4. But I couldn’t see how to getthere.

In narrative nonfiction writing, taking notes is an essentialpart of the creative process. We tend to think of a reporter’s notes asbeing a transcript of the words of someone speaking to the reporter. Ifyou who are reading this happen to be a student of journalism, rememberthat you can take notes about anything. It can be quite usefulto jot down observations on any and all details of a person and a scene,including sights, smells, and sounds, as well as the emotional aura ofthe scene. These kinds of observed details might be called deep notes.Deep notes are a record of the visceral reality in which the charactersexist–notes on the soup. Deep notes can be details of how peoplemove their bodies, what they wear, what sorts of tics and gestures theydisplay. I always try to note the color of a person’s eyes, and, when possible,I try to observe their hands.

One of the main figures in The Hot Zone is Lieutenant ColonelNancy Jaax, an Army space-suit scientist who specializes in Ebola virus.I met Nancy Jaax during my first visit to Fort Detrick, on a warmspring day. She turned out to be a pleasant, energetic, articulate officerwho seemed incredibly committed to her work. I learned that she wasa mother of two children, who were then in high school. Her eyes wereblue-green and active, with flecks of gold encircling the irises. Aboutfifteen minutes into my first interview with her, I asked her if she hadever had a scary experience with Ebola virus. “Oh, sure,” she answered.

“That’s where you realize that habits can save your life.”

“What sort of habits?” I asked.

She explained that when you’re working with a hot virus likeEbola, it’s essential to constantly check your space suit. A suit can geta hole in it. The person inside the suit might not notice the creation ofthe breach. Nancy Jaax had been trained to frequently check her spacesuit for leaks. One day, she was cutting open a dead Ebola-infectedmonkey, and her space suit was splashed with Ebola-infected monkeyblood up to the forearms. Then, during a routine safety check, she discovereda hole in the arm of the suit, near the glove. Ebola-infectedblood had run down into the hole and was oozing around inside herspace suit and had soaked her arm and wrist. “I had an open cut on myhand, with a Band-Aid on it,” she said. She’d gotten the cut opening acan of beans for her children. The incident “fell into the category of aclose call,” she said. In the end, she survived her encounter with Ebolaonly because her habit of checking her space suit for leaks enabled herto get out of the hot zone fast and remove her bloody space suit. Hernarrative left me mesmerized.

There’s a useful technique for capturing important moments duringan interview that I call the delayed note. When someone is sayingsomething powerful, you don’t always want to draw attention to thefact that you’re writing down their words, because they may pull backand stop talking. So, on rare occasions, I may stop writing. I put downmy notebook. I try to get a neutral expression on my face, as if I’m notthat interested. Meanwhile, I’m trying to memorize exactly what theperson is saying. When I sense that my short-term memory is gettingfull, I change the subject and ask a question that I expect will result ina dull answer. The person begins giving the dull answer, and I beginjotting delayed notes in my notebook. I’m writing down what the personsaid moments earlier, while I was not taking notes. (I learned thistechnique from John McPhee, who teaches an undergraduate writingcourse at Princeton University called The Literature of Fact. I hadtaken his course as a graduate student.) So, as Nancy Jaax began to talkabout the blood in her space suit, I put down my notes and listened.This was just the beginning of the research for a key scene in TheHot Zone, narrating how Nancy Jaax got a hole in her space suit andEbola blood flowed inside it. At one point, much later, I spent twentyminutes sitting with Jaax at her kitchen table, taking notes on herhands. I examined her hands minutely, left and right, back and front,staring at them like a palm reader. Hands are a window into character.Jaax kindly submitted to my study of her hands, though I think itweirded her out just a little.

“Where did you get that scar on your knuckle?” I asked.

“Which one? That one? That’s where a goat bit me when I wasnine,” she answered, touching the scar. It had been a goat on her family’sfarm in Kansas, she explained, and she could still recall how muchthe bite had hurt.

Deep notes can also be notes on what a person is thinking. Ofcourse, since you can’t read minds, you have to ask people what theyare thinking or were thinking. After I’ve written a passage describing aperson’s stream of thoughts–a type of narrative that fiction writersrefer to as interior monologue–I always fact-check it with the personlater. I read the passage aloud, usually on the telephone. I ask the person,“Do these sentences accurately reflect your recollection of whatwas going through your mind at that moment?”

Often, the person answers, “Not exactly,” and proceeds to correctwhat I’ve written to make it more faithful to their own memory. If itwas an especially dramatic, emotional, or terrifying moment, the personcan often give a consistent account of what they were thinking andfeeling. (Witnesses to crimes often don’t accurately remember the factsof what they saw–but they do remember their feelings with clarity.)After Jaax had realized that Ebola blood was slopping around insideher space suit, she had to make an emergency exit from Level 4.She went into the air lock and stood in the chemical shower, feeling theblood squishing around on her arm and hand.

“Were you thinking you would die?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied. Instead, she had been thinking about the factthat she had forgotten to go to the bank to get money for the babysitterwho was taking care of her kids that day. If she was infected withEbola, the authorities would lock her in the Slammer, and who wasgoing to pay the babysitter?

I don’t think a novelist would be likely to invent this. And if it appearedin a novel, it might not ring true. Yet Jaax’s account of what shewas thinking is completely believable because it occurs in a nonfictionnarrative. It seems to reverberate with general human truth. It is astatement about mothers, children, and death, and it cut me to theheart when I heard it. I could not have made it up.

In the bloody space-suit scene, when Nancy Jaax emerged fromthe chemical shower and took off her suit to examine her hand, to seeif there was any Ebola blood on it, I described her hands in detail as hergloves came off. Just a couple of sentences. These sentences were theresult of the long examination of her hands at her kitchen table. I mentionedthe scar on her knuckle and that she’d gotten it as a girl from agoat bite at her family’s farm in Kansas. The scar was a microstory. Ittold the reader that Nancy Jaax was a Kansas farm girl; she wasDorothy in Level 4.

While I often take photographs to supplement my notes, I almostnever use a tape recorder. Apart from the fact that a tape recorder alwaysseems to fail when it’s most needed, the device makes the personwho’s being recorded self-conscious. An interviewee will stare at thetape recorder while his or her speech becomes awkward, not like thenatural, lively voice of a person in real life. Indeed, cameras and soundrecorders aren’t sufficient for deep notes. No electronic recording devicecan capture the interplay of the human senses. For capturing sensualreality, it seems that only an old-fashioned reporter’s notebook hassufficiently advanced technology. I take notes in longhand in little spiralnotebooks. They are small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. I use amechanical pencil.

Two army virus researchers walked down one of the long corridorsof USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick. I had been hanging around withthem that day. My shirt pocket had a magnetic security card clipped toit, with the word VISITOR on it. My shirt pocket also contained a smallreporter’s notebook and a mechanical pencil. The walls of the corridorwere cinder block, painted the color of sputum. Thick glass windowslooked into sealed laboratory suites–Biosafety Level 2, Level 3, andLevel 4. The corridor was filled with a weird, burning, moist smell.This smell, which will never leave my mind, was the odor of giant autoclaves–huge, pressurized steam ovens, full of equipment and wastefrom the labs, cooking the stuff at high heat and pressure, to make itsterile.

The researchers’ names will be given here as Martha and Jeremy;those are not their real names.

Jeremy glanced at Martha. “I was thinking it might be a good dayfor going into BL-4,” he said.

“I was thinking so, too,” she answered. She was looking at me.Jeremy turned to me and said, casually, “Are you up for BL-4today?”

We were standing before an inconspicuous door marked AA-5. Itled to one of the Ebola suites, a group of rooms where Ebola researchwas actively being done. “What will we be doing in there?” I asked.“Somebody died,” Jeremy answered ominously. “The blood samplescame in the other day. We’re doing tests to try to identify any virusin the samples.”

The dead person’s identity had not been disclosed to the Army researchers.They had been told he was a “John Doe” male. He had apparentlybeen a U.S. government employee. He might have been asoldier. Or he might have been a diplomat. Or, possibly, John Doe hadworked for an intelligence agency such as the CIA. The researcherswould never learn his name, the circumstances of his death, where hehad died, or who his employer had been.

The Institute had relationships with various U.S. governmentagencies and offices. They were known as clients. The Institute’sclients included the White House, the Department of Defense, and, almostcertainly, a number of intelligence agencies. The Institute performedresearch for its clients. Whichever client John Doe had workedfor, he had died with symptoms that suggested a hot virus. His deathhad apparently involved tiny, starlike pools of blood under his skin, andblood might have been flowing from his orifices.

Marburg virus is a type of Ebola that is associated with KitumCave, in the rain forest on the eastern side of Mount Elgon, an extinctvolcano in East Africa. On at least two occasions, people who went insideKitum Cave died shortly afterward of Marburg virus, having apparentlycaught the virus inside or near the cave.

“If there’s a virus in the blood samples, it’s considered a BiosafetyLevel 4 agent,” Jeremy continued. “This is because the guy died andbecause it [the putative X virus] hasn’t been identified. It’s an Unknown,”he said.

Martha swiped her ID card across a sensor, and a computersynthesizedvoice issued from a speaker by the door: “RTU downloading.”There was a chime. “One moment please,” the computer said. Agreen light went on, and there was a click. The entry door had unlocked.Martha went through the entry door and closed it behind her. Thelight over the door went from green to red.

Meanwhile, Jeremy and I waited in the corridor. Beyond the doorwas a locker room. Martha would take off all her clothing in the lockerroom and then would proceed inward through some other rooms,where she would put on her space suit and head into the Ebola zone.In a few minutes, the light turned green again. This meant thatMartha had left the locker room and had gone farther inward. Now wecould enter.

Jeremy swiped his security card on a pad by the door, I swipedmine, and we entered the locker room. As we went into the room, wepassed through an additional security system that won’t be describedhere.

In the end, I never found out what role the commander had in myvisit to Level 4. But I think he must have known about it. Jeremy andMartha were experienced, cautious professionals with impeccablesafety records. I speculated that the commander had decided to permitme to visit Level 4 with these two people, so long as the visit was keptlow-key–though not unofficial. The main building of USAMRIID hadsecurity guards who sat in a control room, monitoring the movementsof people in the building. I guessed that the security people had knownthat I would be going into a hot zone even before I knew it myself.The magnetic security card that I wore clipped to my shirt could showthe security staff my location in the building; it would also tell themthat I was entering the hot area.

The locker room was small and gritty-looking, with a woodenbench and some steel gym lockers, banged up and dented. Jeremy andI stripped down to nothing and put our clothing in the lockers.

“You need to take off your glasses and leave them, too,” he said.

“They’d fog up inside the suit, anyway.”

People had to take out contact lenses, as well. They also had to removejewelry, including engagement rings. (Women were allowed towear a tampon in Level 4, but they had to remove it on their way outof the lab.)

I put my glasses in the locker. As I took off my shirt, I slipped thenotebook out of my pocket, and I clipped the mechanical pencil to thenotebook. Holding these two items, but otherwise stark naked, I followedJeremy through a doorway that led inward.

The doorway was actually a tiled shower stall, with a water showerheadin it and a drain in the floor. The shower stall glowed deep purplewith ultraviolet lights. On their way out of the hot zone, afterhaving worked in a space suit with dangerous organisms, the researcherswould pass naked through the water shower, washing theirskin with detergent and bathing their bodies in ultraviolet light, beforethey went into the locker room to get dressed.

On the inward side of the ultraviolet doorway was a small roomconsidered to be at Biosafety Level 2–the mildest degree of biocontainment.Some metal shelves stood against one wall, and there was atoilet. The shelves were piled with blue cotton surgical scrub suits andother items of surgical wear, along with rolls of tape. We put onscrubs–no underwear was allowed. We also put on white socks, surgicalhair coverings, and surgical gloves. Jeremy showed me how to tapethe socks and the gloves to the cuffs of my scrub suit, wrapping the tapearound the cuff to make a seal. “It’s a good idea to empty your bladder,”Jeremy said. “You won’t get a chance to once you’re in a suit.”

I took up my notebook and pencil, and we pushed through a doorinto Level 3–this was a staging area leading to Level 4. It was a largeroom with cinder-block walls and a concrete floor. We heard a rumbleof air-filtering machinery overhead. The staging area was crowded withpieces of laboratory equipment. Along the left-hand wall hung an arrayof biohazard space suits. They were made of soft blue plastic, with flexibleplastic helmet hoods. Most of the suits had the owners’ nameswritten on them with a Magic Marker.

Martha had already donned her space suit, and she was preparingthings in the staging area. While Jeremy got into his suit, Martha tooka space suit down from the wall and helped me put it on. She openedthe suit, peeling apart a sort of large Ziploc-style zipper that ran acrossthe chest, and handed the opened suit to me.

There was no name on my space suit.

I sat down on a bench and slipped my feet through the chest opening,down into the suit’s legs. My feet ended up inside a pair of softplastic bunny feet attached to the suit’s legs. I drew the suit over mybody, and slid my arms into the sleeves, and into heavy rubber glovesattached to the ends of the sleeves.

I pulled the hood and faceplate down over my head. The spacesuit’s zipper ran diagonally across the chest. I sealed the zipper, runningmy thumb and fingers along the seal, which closed me into thesuit. The zipper was coated with a kind of grease that felt like Vaseline.The seals made a lip-smacking sound as I squeezed the zipper shut.A number of bright yellow air hoses dangled from the ceiling.They were the source of clean air for people’s space suits. Each roomin the hot zone had its own set of air hoses hanging from the ceiling.When you moved from one room to another, you had to detach yourair hose and get connected to a different air hose in the new room.I reached up, grabbed an air hose, pulled it downward (it camedown from a spring coil). I plugged the hose into a socket near my waist.My suit inflated with a roaring sound. Cool, dry air began flowingaround my body. The air was constantly being bled from exhaust portsin the suit, while the suit remained inflated. I felt the air blowingdownward past my face, coming from vents inside the helmet. The airflowwas designed to keep the suit under constant positive pressure, sothat if the fabric developed a hole or a breach, air would flow out of thesuit, and wouldn’t allow any dangerous organisms to flow in.The high flow of air inside the suit created an almost deafeningroar, which made it difficult to hear anything. The researchers had toshout to carry on a conversation in Level 4.

Jeremy closed his suit and pressurized it.

In front of us was a stainless steel door. It had a biohazard symbolon it, dark red, and the wordsBL-4 AREA. BIOHAZARD.NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.FULL SUIT PROTECTION REQUIRED.

Martha took a hose and socketed it into her suit, pressurizing it.Then she turned and faced me. She placed herself between me and thesteel door. Our suits bumped together. She pushed herself up againstme until our faceplates made contact. “HOW ARE YOU DOING?”she asked. It was hard to hear her voice over the roar of the air.

“I’M FINE.”

She looked into my eyes. I thought she was examining me for anysigns of claustrophobia–flushed skin, sweat standing on my face, widestaring eyes.

Evidently I looked all right. She caught Jeremy’s eye and steppedaside.

I took up my notebook and pencil, holding them awkwardly inone of my suit gloves, and we faced the steel door.

Martha looked down at my glove. “WHERE ARE YOU GOINGWITH THAT NOTEBOOK?”

“IN THERE,” I shouted, indicating the door leading to Level 4.She began laughing behind her faceplate. “IT’S FINE TO BRINGYOUR NOTEBOOK INTO BL-4, BUT IT WILL NEVER COMEOUT AGAIN. IT WOULD HAVE TO BE AUTOCLAVED”–cooked in a pressure oven. “THE PAPER WOULD DISSOLVE.”So I couldn’t take notes. We would be in Level 4 for at least anhour. I wouldn’t be able to recall nearly enough. “I NEED SOMEWAY OF TAKING NOTES. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?”“YOU COULD TRY THIS.” She handed me a sheet of flexiblewhite plastic material, rather like paper, but, she explained, it wascoated with Teflon. The researchers used this material in place of paperin a hot zone. You could write on it with a pen. It could be sterilizedwithout damage.

“WHAT ABOUT MY PENCIL?” I asked. “CAN I TAKE THATIN?”

“UH-UH,” Jeremy said, inspecting my mechanical pencil andshaking his head. “THAT’S GOT A SHARP TIP. PUNCTUREYOUR SUIT. SHE’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO WRITEWITH WHEN WE GET TO THE HOT SIDE.”

When you moved from one room to another, you had to detachyour air hose momentarily, walk without pressure in the suit, and thenplug into the next air hose. As soon as the air hose was disconnected,your space suit would deflate.

Martha unclipped her air hose, and her suit went limp around her,shrinking down. She opened the steel door and stepped into the airlock and closed the door behind her. A moment later, Jeremy unclippedhis air hose, and his suit went limp, and he stepped through theair lock door.

This left me alone momentarily in the staging room inside a pressurizedsuit. I looked back at the door we had come in through. Icould do it. I could just leave. Open my space suit and climb out of it,and go back to the locker room and put my clothes on. These peoplewouldn’t care; they’d probably be relieved to see me go.

I unplugged my air hose. My space suit lost pressure and collapsedaround me. Things got quiet: my air wasn’t running. I looked at theexit. Then I turned and opened the steel door and walked into the airlock. The door snapped shut behind me. At the far side of the air lockthere was another steel door. I opened it and entered Level 4.

I found myself standing in a narrow corridor with walls made ofcinder blocks. Martha and Jeremy weren’t in sight. I needed air. Ilooked up and saw a rack of air hoses hanging from the ceiling. Ireached up and plugged a hose into my suit. The roaring noise beganagain, and a rush of air filled my suit, the suit tightening with the pressure.I looked around.

Several pairs of Christopher Robin—style rubber boots were linedup next to the air lock door. You were supposed to wear these boots inLevel 4, to protect the bunny feet of the space suit from tearing as youwalked around. I stepped into a pair of the boots, feeling nervous. Thewalls and floor were covered with thick-looking, beige paint–thepaint was actually a layer of plastic resin that coated the inner surfacesof the hot zone, like the lining of a swimming pool, keeping it waterproofand airtight.

Martha appeared, coming around a corner. She plugged herselfinto an air hose. Then she handed me a Bic ballpoint pen. It was aLevel 4 hot pen, and it would never leave Level 4, except as a meltedlump.

Then we unplugged our air hoses and walked down the corridor.The rooms in Hot Suite AA-5 were small and cramped. They held typicallaboratory equipment, the sort that you might find in any medicalresearch lab in a university or corporation. I was struck by the ordinarinessof Level 4. There were refrigerators, centrifuges, cabinets stockedwith lab supplies. A couple of computers sat on counters. Nothingabout the place suggested the presence of dangerous viruses, exceptfor the unforgettable fact that we were inside space suits. There weresinks with water faucets. Wastewater from the sinks ran into collectiontanks where the waste was sterilized. There was a room that had nothingin it except for two large chest freezers. They were hot freezers, hotas hell; I wondered if they contained Ebola, but I didn’t dare ask. Thefreezers were locked and were equipped with alarms. They could beopened only with combination keypads.I followed Jeremy and Martha around a corner into a small room,where we plugged in our air hoses. Shelves and counters ran aroundthe walls. A sign said:BIOHAZARDHAZARD IDENTITY:

The line had been left blank, since that day the researchers were workingwith an Unknown.

On one counter sat an incubator–a metal box that was kept warminside, at a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, which is 98.6 degreesFahrenheit. The temperature of a human body. Martha opened the incubatorand removed a rack full of small plastic flasks containing theUnknown. The flasks were sealed tightly with screw caps and containeda pinkish fluid. The fluid was a nutrient bath for a layer of livingcells from the kidney of a monkey that were growing on a flat innersurface of each flask. Tiny drops of the blood of victim John Doe hadbeen introduced into these flasks. If Doe’s blood contained a virus, thevirus would be likely to infect the monkey cells. Then the cells wouldstart dying–shriveling up and bursting–and this would be evidencethat the flask contained a virus that had come originally from JohnDoe’s blood.

As yet, there was no direct evidence that John Doe had been infectedwith a virus. He might have died from some other cause. (Otherillnesses, such as malaria, can mimic some of the symptoms of Ebola orMarburg, but we had to assume that John Doe had already been testedby doctors who’d ruled out the more common infections and illnesses.)It was the job of the researchers to determine whether theblood contained a virus and, if so, to try to identify it. This was detectivework. The procedure was that of Sherlock Holmes: you rule outpossibilities until only one possibility remains.

Martha wanted to look at the monkey cells to see if any of themshowed signs of being infected with a virus. She sat down at a counterand placed one of the little flasks under a microscope. She did not openthe flask. She stared into the eyepieces of the microscope through herfaceplate, turning her head back and forth. “DO YOU KNOW HOWHARD IT IS TO GET YOUR HEAD COCKED SO YOU CAN SEEINTO A MICROSCOPE?” she yelled over the unending roar of air.She stood up. “DO YOU WANT TO LOOK?”

I sat down on the chair before the microscope. I had difficulty seeingthrough my faceplate into the eyepieces. I began twisting my headaround. Finally I got a clear look through the microscope into theflask.

I could see glittering fields of monkey cells, reddish gold in color.Were they sick or healthy? They were just cells to me. As for the Xvirus, if any particles of it had been present in the cells they would nothave been visible through the microscope. Virus particles are too smallto be seen with an optical microscope. Most viruses can be seen onlywith an electron microscope, which magnifies things that are extremelysmall. A cold virus particle sitting at the base of an eyelash hair wouldbe like a peanut sitting by the Washington Monument.

As I was staring into the eyepieces of the microscope, I felt a poppingsensation. Something felt weird around my chest. My suit beganto feel sloppy and loose. But I was interested in the cells and wasn’tpaying attention to my space suit. Eventually, though, I moved awayfrom the microscope and stood up. That was when I realized that myspace suit had blown open in the hot zone.

Air was rushing out around my neck and chest, pouring out of thesuit. With a growing sense of alarm, I looked down to try to see whatwas happening, but couldn’t see anything. The lower part of my helmethood blocked the view. I started feeling around with my gloves,but couldn’t get much sensation, for the gloves were thick and clumsy.I began tugging on something, some sort of fabric. To my horror, I realizedthat I was grabbing at my surgical scrubs. I was feeling aroundinside my space suit.

I knew what had happened. As I had been bending over the microscope,the movement had twisted the zipper that ran across thesuit’s chest, and the lips of the zipper had pulled apart, and the pressurein the suit had opened it completely. And now I couldn’t get thezipper closed. I almost threw a tubular cast.

“DO I HAVE A PROBLEM HERE?” I yelled.

Jeremy had been working with his back toward me. He swungaround, looked at me, and swore. He moved toward me, holding hispalms outward. He ran his palms back and forth on my chest, closingthe zipper.

My suit swelled up and tightened, regaining pressure.

“HOW BAD WAS THAT?” I asked.

He looked a little embarrassed. “THE ZIPPERS GET WORN.THEY CAN POP OPEN.”

I had ended up with a ratty old piece of Army gear, a space suit thatbelonged to nobody. A little voice started speaking in my head. Whatare you doing here? the voice said. You’re in an Ebola lab in a fuckingdefective space suit. I started to feel giddy. It was an intoxicating rush offear, a sensation that all I needed to do was relax and let the fear takehold, and I could drift away on waves of panic, screaming for help.Martha was looking into my eyes again.

The little voice went on: You’re headed for the Slammer.Jeremy tried to soothe me. He assured me that the incident wasnot, in fact, an exposure to a hot agent. The suits did occasionally popopen, he admitted. “THE THING IS, YOUR SUIT HAD POSITIVEPRESSURE THE WHOLE TIME,” he explained. “THE AIR WASFLOWING DOWN PAST YOUR FACE AND OUT OF THEOPENING. NOTHING COULD GET INTO YOUR SUIT. ITCOULDN’T MOVE UP TO YOUR FACE.”

I really wanted to believe that an Unknown virus was not havingan encounter with me inside my space suit. The air had been gushingout, I told myself. The flow would have carried any particles of a hotagent out of my suit. Anyway, if something had gotten in, by now itwas too late to panic. I told the scientists that I wanted to remain inLevel 4. After that, I touched my chest zipper frequently to make sureit was closed. Habits can save your life.

The researchers had work to do. Martha intended to open a flaskof the Joe Doe Unknown. She carried one of the flasks to a Steriguardsafety hood–a cabinet that produced a curtain of air blowing betweenthe virus samples and the person sitting there. This air curtain acted asa shield, preventing any drifting particles from coming near the researcher.The cabinet also had a sliding glass door. If you opened theglass too far–potentially releasing a virus into the air of the hotzone–an alarm would go off.

With a pair of tweezers, Martha picked up a glass slide that hadspots of reactive compound on it. It was called a spot slide. You dropliquid samples of virus on the spots, and if a spot changes color, it helpsyou identify the virus. “WE HANDLE GLASS WITH TWEEZERSBECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO PICK UP ANYTHING MADEOF GLASS WITH YOUR FINGERS,” she said. “YOU NEVERWANT TO CUT YOURSELF IN HERE.”

Martha opened the flask containing the Unknown. She took up apush-button pipette–a device that is used in biological labs for movingvery small quantities of fluid from one place to another.She inserted the tip of the pipette into the open flask and pushed abutton, and the pipette sucked up a small amount of the liquid containingthe Unknown X. She positioned the pipette over the glass slideand placed droplets of the liquid on the slide. Her hands moved withdeft precision.

“DO YOU WANT TO TRY DOING THIS?” she asked.

I sat down in front of the safety cabinet. She handed me anotherflask. I had difficulty removing the cap from the flask. My heavy rubberspace-suit gloves were impossible. I picked up the pipette andbegan dropping the liquid into a row of small test tubes, so that testscould be done on it. Even this simple task proved to be achingly slowand difficult. I couldn’t see how anyone could do medical researchwearing Mickey Mouse gloves and a space suit. The fact that the Armyresearchers were able to do it every day made me appreciate the depthof their skill and training. My cheek began to itch, but I couldn’t figureout how to scratch it, since my head was inside a helmet hood.When I had finished the task, I closed the flask and held it up to thelight.

The liquid shimmered inside; I was face-to-face with a presumedLevel 4 Unknown. My cheek was itching badly. “HOW DO YOUDEAL WITH AN ITCH IN ONE OF THESE SUITS?” I asked.“YOU DON’T,” Jeremy shouted above the unending roar of air.Eventually the two researchers wrapped up a certain phase of theirwork. Thus far, they still had no information about what had killedJohn Doe.

Martha remarked that it was time to check on the monkeys.“THERE ARE MONKEYS IN HERE?” I asked nervously. Thelittle voice started up again: Are they infected? Go now to the exit.Of course there were monkeys in here, Jeremy said. They had beenvocalizing–screeching–the whole time, but the rushing sound of airin our space suits had drowned out their cries, he explained. He detachedhis air hose and began walking down a corrider, evidently headingfor the monkeys.

“DO THEY HAVE BLOODY NOSES?” I asked.

The monkeys were fine, Jeremy said. He led me through a doorinto the largest room in Hot Suite AA-5. It was lit with flourescentlights. Along two walls of the room, stainless steel wire cages werestacked from floor to ceiling. Most of the cages were empty, but severalof them held monkeys.

“THESE MONKEYS ARE SURVIVORS,” Jeremy said.The monkeys were excited to see us. They raced back and forth intheir cages, their eyes fixed on us. They were rhesus monkeys. Two ofthem sported wicked-looking canine fangs. (“Organ-grinder monkeysthey aren’t,” one Army scientist had remarked.) The largest one, a male,bared his canines at me, staring at me with wide, fierce-looking eyes.Martha came in. “THEY’RE MAKING THREAT DISPLAYS ATYOU,” she said. “THEY DON’T RECOGNIZE YOU.”

The monkeys could recognize human faces, even inside a spacesuit. The monkeys knew Martha and Jeremy, and seemed to look forwardto their visits, for the humans fed the monkeys treats. The monkeysalso seemed to find humans entertaining.

As a part of the Institute’s work in developing drugs and vaccinesto protect humans against diseases, researchers exposed monkeys toviruses and then tested various treatments on them. Many monkeysdied during such tests, but there were always survivors. “THIS MONKEYIS A SURVIVOR OF A COMBINATION OF SIMIAN HEMORRHAGICFEVER AND EBOLA VIRUS,” Jeremy told me,pointing to one. “AND THIS ONE SURVIVED MARBURGVIRUS,” he said, pointing to another.

Marburg is the type of Ebola associated with Kitum Cave. Themonkey that had survived a Marburg infection was about six years old,and his name was Eighty-seven. His odds of survival had been slim, butnow he was healthy and very likely immune to Marburg. He was smartand easily bored. He yawned at us, exposing cruel-looking fangs.Jeremy shuffled over to a shelf and got a box of Froot Loops cereal.Eighty-seven became excited.

Jeremy handed me the box and suggested that I give some of thecereal to Eighty-seven, to help make friends with him. I pulled a coupleof Froot Loops out of the box. Keeping my eyes averted respectfully, forEighty-seven was a dominant male and would become angry if I lookedat him (in monkey language, staring is the equivalent of giving the finger),I placed the Froot Loops on my palm and held out my hand. Themonkey’s arm shot out of the cage, and he plucked the cereal from mypalm and crammed it into his mouth, and then held out his hand formore. He might have been able to tear my space suit if he had wantedto, but once I had offered him Froot Loops he became friendly. I offeredhim more Froot Loops. He kept shoving his hand out for more.

A Froot Loop fell to the floor, and Eighty-seven followed it with hiseyes, looking wistful, I thought. He put out his hand for more.The Army people had become fond of the monkeys. Their feelingwas that any monkey that had survived Ebola should be allowed to liveout the rest of its days in peace. In addition, the survivors’ blood containedimmune antibodies to the viruses, which could be used in experiments.

But the monkeys could not leave the hot zone, becausethere was a worry that they might still be silent carriers of the virusesthat had once infected them. “BASICALLY, NOBODY KNOWSMUCH ABOUT EBOLA OR MARBURG, SO WE DON’T KNOWIF THE MONKEYS COULD INFECT ANYONE WITH THESEVIRUSES EVEN AFTER THEY’VE RECOVERED FROM THEDISEASE,” Jeremy said.

We said good-bye to the monkeys and returned to the laboratoryrooms. Finally it was time to make an exit from the hot zone. I followedthe researchers through the maze of corridors and little roomsto the air lock.

Jeremy entered the air lock first and started the chemical shower bypulling on a chain. The shower began running in the air lock, sterilizingthe outside of his space suit. While Martha and I waited for Jeremyto finish his chemical shower, I handed her my Level 4 Bic pen. She leftit near a computer for the next person to use. Then Martha and I wentinto the air lock together. She pulled the chain and we stood under thechemical shower. The chemicals gave off a strong but not unpleasantsmell, which eventually crept inside my space suit.

Martha pointed to my Teflon paper–my notes–which I heldclutched in my glove. “LET ME HAVE THAT FOR A SEC,” she said.She crumpled it up, dipped it into a bath of chemicals, and then, usingboth hands, she scrubbed the Teflon paper against itself and squeezedit, as if she were rinsing a washrag. After a minute or so, she pulled thepaper out of the chemical bath. My notes were wrinkled, wet, and sterile.The shower stopped, and I opened the steel door and stepped intothe normal world, holding the notes.

Later, I wrote about Nancy Jaax’s feelings after she had gotten ahole in her space suit and she was standing in the chemical shower,feeling Ebola blood oozing around inside her suit and wondering whowas going to pay the babysitter. I constructed the passage primarilyfrom detailed interviews with Nancy Jaax, of course. Yet there is somethingelse in that scene that did not appear in the book. It was an icebergof personal experience, one I hadn’t felt able to write about untilnow. I had been in the rooms she had been in. There, I had experienceda breach condition in my space suit, too, and it had happened inthe presence of a putative hot Marburg-like Unknown. And I hadstood in the same chemical shower afterward, with thoughts and fearspouring through my mind. . . . I had been boiled in the soup.

I love exploring unseen worlds. In this book, we are embarkingon a deep probe through the realms of the vanishingly small,where, at times, all we can say is “There be monsters.” The chapters inthis book were originally published in The New Yorker, but I’ve expanded,updated, and linked them.

One monster of the microscopic universe is a mysterious geneticdisease, called Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, which is caused by the alterationof a single letter of a person’s DNA code. If one letter of thehuman DNA is altered in a certain place in the code, the person who isborn with the tiny error has a dramatic change of behavior–a lifelong,irresistable compulsion to attack himself, chewing off . . . it’s in the lastchapter. “The Mountains of Pi” describes David and Gregory Chudnovsky,mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of mail-order parts inGregory’s apartment in New York City. They were using their homemadesupercomputer to calculate the number pi (ð) to billions of decimals.They were looking deep into pi, down into an infinitesimalsmallness of precision, deeper and deeper into pi, trying to get aglimpse of the face of God.

I originally wrote about the Chudnovskys in a “Profile” for TheNew Yorker. When I first met them and began researching the piece,they seemed pleased that I was writing about pi, but they soon got theidea that I was also writing about them. They began to object. “Mydear fellow, can’t you leave our names out of this?” David said.I had to explain that it is not really feasible to leave a person’s nameout of a New Yorker “Profile” of him.

This puzzled me, why the Chudnovskys didn’t want their namesused. The answer, as I finally figured out, had to do with the nature ofmathematics as a human activity. Mathematics is not strictly science,nor is it absolutely art. Mathematics is both objectively rigorous andhighly creative, and so it spans the divide between the two worlds, andexpresses the unity of science and art. In effect, mathematics is a cathedralof the intellect, built over thousands of years, displaying some ofthe greatest achievements of the human spirit. The Chudnovsky brotherssaw themselves as anonymous workers adding a few details to thecathedral. Their names didn’t matter.

When I had finally gotten their reluctant assent to let me writeabout them as people and had finished drafting “The Mountains ofPi,” a fact-checker from The New Yorker named Hal Espen paid a visitto the Chudnovsky brothers in order to verify the facts in my piece.Soon afterward, Gregory phoned me in a state of indignation. HalEspen had spent a long time in Gregory’s apartment, looking at thethings I’d described and asking the brothers many questions. At onepoint, he wanted to confirm that Gregory owned hand-sewn socksmade of scraps of cloth, as I had written, so he asked Gregory if hecould see his socks. Gregory wasn’t wearing them, so Espen ended uplooking in one of the drawers of Gregory’s dresser, where he found thesocks and verified my description of them. “He was a nice guy, but whydid he have to rifle through my socks?” Gregory demanded.* If thenames of the cathedral workers didn’t matter, their socks matteredeven less. But Gregory Chudnovsky’s socks mattered deeply to me, forthe same reason that the color of Nancy Jaax’s eyes and the scar on herhand mattered. The business of a writer, in the end, is human character,human story. Unlike a novelist, a narrative nonfiction writer cannotmake up details of character. For the nonfiction writer, details must befound where they exist, like diamonds lying in the dust, unnoticed bypassing crowds.

In exploring biology, I moved my focus away from the smallestlife-forms–viruses–and began climbing the coast redwood trees ofCalifornia. The coast redwoods are the largest individual living thingsin nature. Redwoods can be nearly forty stories tall; they would standout in midtown Manhattan. In order to climb a redwood, you put ona harness and ascend hundreds of feet up a rope into the redwoodcanopy. It’s like scuba diving, except that you go into the air. Thecanopy is the aerial part of a forest, and it is an unseen world, invisiblefrom the ground. Once you have ascended into the redwood canopy,which is the world’s tallest canopy, you dangle in midair, in a harness,around thirty stories above the ground. You are suspended from ropesattached to branches overhead. You move through the air while hangingon ropes, sometimes going from tree to tree. The redwood canopyis a lost world, unexplored, out of sight, teeming with unknown life.

After writing a book about it (The Wild Trees), I learned of the existenceof an unexplored rain-forest canopy in eastern North America; Ihadn’t known there were rain forests in the East. This eastern rain forestwas being destroyed by parasites invading the ecosystem. It was anunseen world that was vanishing even before it had been explored byhumans. Thus an interest in giant life-forms ended up returning me toa focus on small things: “A Death in the Forest.”

“The Search for Ebola” is about the search for the unknown hostof the Ebola virus, and it narrates an outbreak of Ebola in Congo. Inresearching it, I ended up talking with a medical doctor named William

*Hal Espen later became a senior editor at The New Yorker and later theeditor of Outside magazine.

T. Close. Bill Close, who is the father of the actress Glenn Close, hadbeen the head of the main hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo(then called Zaire). Then, while I was staying late in the offices of TheNew Yorker on a Friday night–closing time, when the magazine is putto bed–I telephoned Dr. Close for a last-minute fact-checking conversation.In about ten minutes (I had been told) the magazine wouldbe closed–finished–and would be transmitted electronically to theprinting plant in Danville, Kentucky. That was when Dr. Close told methe story of a Belgian doctor who had performed a terrifying act thatcould be called an Ebola kiss, with a patient in an Ebola ward.

“Oh, my God,” I blurted.

I asked someone to go find Tina Brown, the editor, and see if themagazine could be held open for a little while, as a doctor was sayingsomething. It was okay with Brown, but there was no time to takenotes. I asked Close to tell me the story again, while I scrawled sentencesdescribing the Ebola kiss on a sheet of paper. With Close waitingon the line, I carried the paper over to the make-up department (anoffice where the magazine’s compositors worked at computer screens)and I handed it to Pat Keogh, the head of make-up, who typed myscrawl into the master electronic proof. Almost immediately, the passagewas reviewed for grammar by The New Yorker’s grammarian, aquiet person named Ann Goldstein. (Experts who are being quoted inThe New Yorker are encouraged not to use bad grammar.)

Minutes later, with Bill Close still waiting on the telephone, weheard that his grammar was okay, and we heard that the magazine hadbeen transmitted electronically to the printing plant. I said good nightto the now-eponymous Dr. Close and hung up.

That was when something struck me. How could I have been sostupid? I had forgotten to ask Close what had happened to the Belgiandoctor afterward. He would have died a grisly death. Years later, Ilearned what had transpired, and you will read it here.In “The Human Kabbalah,” I explored the decoding of thehuman DNA and the resulting fantastic stock-market bubble thatmade the genomic scientist J. Craig Venter a billionaire for a while.One day, while working on this story, I was hanging out in the laboratoryof the Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith–one of the great fig-ures in the history of molecular biology–and I mentioned to him thatI was having trouble, as a writer, describing DNA in a physical sense. Iwanted readers to get a concrete picture of it in their minds. “Thetrouble is, DNA is invisible,” I said to Hamilton Smith.

“No, it isn’t,” he said. He asked me if I’d ever seen it. I hadn’t, sohe dribbled some purified DNA out of a test tube. It looked like clearsnot.

“What does it taste like?” I asked him.

That surprised him a little. He didn’t know. In almost forty yearsof research with DNA, Hamilton Smith had never tasted the molecule.As soon as I got home, I ordered some pure, dried DNA throughthe mail. It arrived: a bit of fluff in a bottle. I put some of it on mytongue. Sure enough, it had a taste. In taking notes, it is useful to rememberthat all the senses can be involved.

I continued to follow the Chudnovsky brothers and their journeysin the universe of numbers. This led them, with me trailing behind, tothe mysterious Unicorn Tapestries, owned by the Metropolitan Museumof New York. All the while, I was researching the curious geneticdisease that causes people to mutilate and even, in effect, cannibalizetheir own bodies–Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

The disease was almost unbearable to contemplate, and at first almostimpossible to describe. It made its victims seem inhuman. Icouldn’t find a way into the writing of the story, despite spendingmonths and finally years on it. Ultimately, the last chapter of this booktook me seven years to write. The disease probably could not be inventedby a fiction writer, or if it were invented, it would not seem believable.Yet there it was, an undeniable reality. I needed to understand,if possible, what it might feel like to have this disease. I wanted to tryto connect the seemingly unknowable experience of self-cannibalismto that of common humanity. Henry Fielding, in his famous preface tohis novel The History of Tom Jones, in which he defined the basic termsof fiction writing, quoted Terence: “I am human: nothing human isalien to me.” If people with Lesch-Nyhan disease were human, thenthey could not be alien to us. The only way to find humanity in thestory was to climb into the soup with two people who had been bornwith the disease and start taking notes.

About Richard Preston

Richard Preston is the bestselling author of The Hot Zone, The Demon in the Freezer, The Wild Trees, and the novel The Cobra Event. A writer for The New Yorker since 1985, Preston is the only nondoctor to have received the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award. He also holds an award from the American Institute of Physics. Preston lives outside of New York City.

Praise

Praise

“Compelling . . . stories of high scientific adventure.”—Seattle Times

“[Preston’s] stories sparkle with images of stark beauty and darkness; mature reflections about the complex worlds we all occupy.”—Denver Post